The Impact of Program Wisata Museum on Museum Empowerment as Tourism Destination in Indonesia: A Case Study

Museums carry out educational function for the community, as well being educational-heritage tourism destinations. Much knowledge could be learned from but none if museums aren’t visited. Many museums in Indonesia still facing lack of visitors problem due to their poor ability to attract tourists. Being a proper tourims
destination might benefit museums in attracting more visitors, better quality positioning, more funding, more stakeholders trust, and even encourage free promotions. In 2008 Wisata Museum, a joint promotion program
initiated and organized by House of Sampoerna (HoS) Museum, aimed to motivate museum selfempowerment
in becoming a decent tourism destination. It tried to provoke empowerment by fully-sponsoring production and distribution of brochures and a website: joint promotional medias of six selected museum partners from across Java. None evaluations was done therefore this study was meant to identify program’s
impacts on museum tourism destinations using instrumental case study method. The results showed that
museum partners felt positive impacts: foreign tourists positive appreciation, positive changes in visitors demography, internal stakeholder trust and internal performance improvement, the atmospherics and promotional media stock continuity gave impression as qualified, positive, and attractive museum tourism
destination, the museum partners are motivated to empower themselves to be educational tourism destination.
However those positive impacts didn’t occured evenly among museum partners. Whilst the cigarette company background of HoS museum negatively affected one of the partners. It’s suggested that HoS Museum should conduct a thorough program evaluation which may resulted some inputs for program’s future, to obtain maximum impact as its objective.